Excerpt from Home Baked in Bon Appetit’s Healthyish

If you haven’t heard of Sticky Fingers Brownies, here’s why: we got away with it. For more than twenty years—from the disco-mad seventies through the AIDS crisis and the dawn of medical marijuana—my mom and her collaborators produced potent, chocolatey edibles in an underground marijuana bakery, and in defiance of the law. And I grew up watching.

My mom had catered to San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community since the seventies. By the mid ‘80s, HIV/AIDS was rampant. There was no cure, no effective treatment. In those days, diagnosis was considered a death sentence.